The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

“Suspended for some College scrape. He was a great favorite here.

Father and he were famous friends. Father said that Philip had no end of

nonsense in him and was always blundering into something, but he was a

royal good fellow and would come out all right.”

“Did you think he was fickle?”

“Why, I never thought whether he was or not,” replied Alice looking up.

“I suppose he was always in love with some girl or another, as college

boys are. He used to make me his confidant now and then, and be terribly

in the dumps.”

“Why did he come to you?” pursued Ruth you were younger than he.”

“I’m sure I don’t know. He was at our house a good deal. Once at a

picnic by the lake, at the risk of his own life, he saved sister Millie

from drowning, and we all liked to have him here. Perhaps he thought as

he had saved one sister, the other ought to help him when he was in

trouble. I don’t know.”

The fact was that Alice was a person who invited confidences, because she

never betrayed them, and gave abundant sympathy in return. There are

persons, whom we all know, to whom human confidences, troubles and heart-

aches flow as naturally its streams to a placid lake.

This is not a history of Fallkill, nor of the Montague family, worthy as

both are of that honor, and this narrative cannot be diverted into long

loitering with them. If the reader visits the village to-day, he will

doubtless be pointed out the Montague dwelling, where Ruth lived, the

cross-lots path she traversed to the Seminary, and the venerable chapel

with its cracked bell.

In the little society of the place, the Quaker girl was a favorite, and

no considerable social gathering or pleasure party was thought complete

without her. There was something in this seemingly transparent and yet

deep character, in her childlike gaiety and enjoyment of the society

about her, and in her not seldom absorption in herself, that would have

made her long remembered there if no events had subsequently occurred to

recall her to mind.

To the surprise of Alice, Ruth took to the small gaieties of the village

with a zest of enjoyment that seemed foreign to one who had devoted her

life to a serious profession from the highest motives. Alice liked

society well enough, she thought, but there was nothing exciting in that

of Fallkill, nor anything novel in the attentions of the well-bred young

gentlemen one met in it. It must have worn a different aspect to Ruth,

for she entered into its pleasures at first with curiosity, and then with

interest and finally with a kind of staid abandon that no one would have

deemed possible for her. Parties, picnics, rowing-matches, moonlight

strolls, nutting expeditions in the October woods,–Alice declared that

it was a whirl of dissipation. The fondness of Ruth, which was scarcely

disguised, for the company of agreeable young fellows, who talked

nothings, gave Alice opportunity for no end of banter.

“Do you look upon them as I subjects, dear?” she would ask.

And Ruth laughed her merriest laugh, and then looked sober again.

Perhaps she was thinking, after all, whether she knew herself.

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would

swim if you brought it to the Nile.

Surely no one would have predicted when Ruth left Philadelphia that she

would become absorbed to this extent, and so happy, in a life so unlike

that she thought she desired. But no one can tell how a woman will act

under any circumstances. The reason novelists nearly always fail in

depicting women when they make them act, is that they let them do what

they have observed some woman has done at sometime or another. And that

is where they make a mistake; for a woman will never do again what has

been done before. It is this uncertainty that causes women, considered

as materials for fiction, to be so interesting to themselves and to

others.

As the fall went on and the winter, Ruth did not distinguish herself